The ultimate Airfix kit: For sale at £1.4m, RAF veteran's biplane built from scratch

It was meant to be a ‘modest little project’ to keep Squadron Leader Howell Davies occupied when he retired from the RAF.

Over the next 18 years, building a 1930s biplane in the same way generations of boys made Airfix models turned into an all-consuming passion.

It involved a worldwide search for parts and 35,000 hours of restoration work, not to mention sleepless nights over what turned out to be the £1million-plus cost.

Silver dream machine: The Hawker Demon in flight after being painstakingly built from scratch by former RAF pilot Howell Davies

But above all, it was a labour of love dedicated to Mr Davies’s wife Tania, known to all as Mouse, who inspired him to return the Hawker Demon to the skies but who died mid-way through the marathon endeavour.

How poignant it was, then, when Mr Davies watched the former RAF fighter soar across the sky again for the first time in seven decades.

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Two years have passed since then and the gleaming silver machine has delighted thousands at air shows across the UK as the only flying Hawker Demon in the world.

At the age of 72, however, Mr Davies has decided it is time to wave a fond farewell to the historic aircraft which has filled his life for 20 years, and put it on sale at an estimated £1.4million.

'Piles of wreckage': The aeroplane parts with which Mr Howell began his project at his home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, after he retired

Mr Davies, who flew Vulcan bombers and was an instructor during his 32-year career, said: ‘I spent my life in the RAF as a pilot and this all really started off as a stitch-up by my wife and son Peter for when I retired. They arranged it to keep the old chap busy.’

In July 1991 they bought the fuselage, together with a fin, rudder, tail plane, wing parts and undercarriage, for £150,000 from a specialist vintage aeroplane company.

The parts were from a Demon with the serial number K8203, built in Wolverhampton in 1937. Official records show it was assigned to 64 Squadron at RAF Church Fenton.

Poignant: Mr Howell with wife Tania who died mid-way through the construction of the plane

‘At the start it was really piles of wreckage,’ said Mr Davies, from Hitchin, Hertfordshire. ‘There were lots of other bits to find and lots that needed to be made again from new although we always tried to get as close to the original parts as possible.’ Some components were rescued from a tip in Ireland, while the supercharged Rolls-Royce Kestrel VDR engine was acquired from Australia (64 Demons were made for the Australian government as well as the 240 built for the RAF).

The restoration work was entrusted to SkySport Engineering, of Sandy, Bedfordshire, with the instruction that the finished aircraft should be historically accurate in every way. Apart from one ‘smallish’ loan, all the funding was privately raised by father-of-three Mr Davies and his family.

‘My wife died ten years ago at the age of 57,’ he said. ‘She was the driving force, and particularly after she died my main aim was to finish it and see it fly at displays.’ The Civil Aviation Authority inspector assigned to the project even delayed his retirement so he could sign off the test flight programme, rendering it officially airworthy.

The restored Demon – decorated with the livery of 64 Squadron – took to the skies again on June 23, 2009, and made its air show debut two months later, all in the hands of pilot Stuart Goldspink. Mr Davies has not flown the two-seater himself, although he has been in the gunner’s seat behind the pilot.

The Demon was a precursor of the Hawker Hurricane, which along with the Spitfire became a symbol of the Battle of Britain.

It had a top speed of 182mph, a wingspan of 37ft 2in and was armed with twin 7.7mm Vickers machine guns and one Lewis gun. Some saw action in the Abyssinia crisis of 1935 but by the Second World War the Demon was obsolete.

Mr Davies’s plane has won two awards – the 2010 Historic Aircraft Association’s Conrod Trophy for an ‘outstanding contribution to the preservation and safe operation of historic aircraft’ and the Freddie March Spirit of Aviation Trophy.

It is being offered for private sale via H & H Classics, which specialises in collectors’ vehicles.